You’re in a large building, driving in a remote area, or even right in the middle of a big city, and you can’t stream video, check email or even make a phone call — because your cellular signal is weak. But the future may be different.

A chemistry professor has come up with a more sustainable way to make silicon at much lower temperatures for the kind of advanced batteries used in electronics such as phones, cameras and laptop computers.

An advance by UW–Madison engineers could enable manufacturers to add “smart,” wireless capabilities to any number of large or small products or objects — like wearable sensors and computers for people and animals — that curve, bend, stretch and move.

Computer chip makers continuously strive to pack more transistors in less space, yet as the size of those transistors approaches the atomic scale, there are physical limits on how small they are able to make the patterns for the circuitry.

For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power. Now, for the first time, University of Wisconsin–Madison materials engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that outperform state-of-the-art silicon transistors.